Open Source Health & fitness?

Open Source and health/fitness. Does it blend?

maybe lead with wger nutrition and tapas, and then continue?

Having worked in and on open source businesses for about 15 years (but mainly on infrastructure and devtools) has confirmed to me that it can be a great way to build a business, certainly not the only way, and a bit of a tricky way, but a way that is rewarding in its own right because it can produce so much value for humanity.

I recently got interested in the health and fitness space. In tech, companies struggle with how to handle the copyright of their software (if they release the code, under which licensing terms), leading to some head scratching events around (re)licensing, forking, value capture, etc. In health/fitness, all code is closed, and the industry players choose to have a rather bizarre relationship with pure information, instead. Resulting in even more head scratching.

Facts are not copyrightable, this is true in just about any country. Similar for ideas and concepts. But specific “renditions” of them are not. This is why every day, fitness influencers post videos on how to do a proper push-up, how to get abs, how much protein to eat, etc. This information is either widely understood, or readily available online already via research papers, articles, etc. But today, most people are on their phone scrolling through the latest videos. So the playbook is:

  • produce yet another video about something that has been said or done 1000 times already (the inefficiency is saddening)
  • make it useful enough to get people interested, but not quite useful enough to be a practical solution. (sounds familiar?)
  • sell them what they actually need: a tool that assists them with what to eat, when to exercise, which exercises to do, etc

An area I have no experience with at all, is consumer marketing. But seems a lot has to do with reaching people through click-bait videos (often questionable titles, drama between different influencers, misleading content to trigger “engagement”, incorrect content cause quality doesn’t sell to the average consumer, etc) and using that to get people to pay for:

  • information
  • tools
  • personalized coaching

As we covered, the information is rarely novel. Workout plans often have been copied for decades, without even a clear source. So it isn’t “proprietary” or valuable information, many players still their users that it is, regardless. Some vendors do go the extra mile to dig into the research, conduct studies etc, and essentially sell their conclusions, at scale, as information or via their tools. The tools (e.g. mobile apps) are often quite similar or even literally the same (whitelabeling). Personalized coaching is like boutique software development: personalized at a huge premium, taking no advantage of the fact that many people deal with similar issues, which can be optimized at scale, with a big lock-in and little assurances around quality.

  • impractical format to use.
  • in person coaching hit or miss.
  • openfoodfacts

db licensed as either CC-BY on public domain

https://github.com/Dieterbe/health-fitness-oss

  • oss blog fitness
    • wger
    • tapas deliberate goal setting from yoga
    • oss fitness repo
    • wger consulting
    • DB
    • trainer course
    • for blog: covered more papers of nutrition science and sports science in 9 months than i have in 20 years of computer science

https://tapas.fit/ lots of ideas wide open. e.g. dynamically generate next exercises to do, both in and out the gym

then reign in ambitions a bit

TODO: check gymbase goals and the other doc and the darebee email maybe

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